Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Because I leave for Pennsic in less than 5 days, I've decided I need a new dress. Obviously. :) To be specific, I need an obnoxious parti-colored bias cut plaid dress, such as were popular for about 20 minutes in late 14th century Spain. Leave it to the Spanish to come up with the craziest of fashion trends.

Anyway, I have the gown out and about half way put together, I'm doing this by machine partly because I have only a few days but mostly because the fabric is mainly cotton. It was either that or heavy wool coating and I'm not about to wear heavy plaid wool in the middle of July in Pennsylvania. The plaid is cotton and the solid kermit green is a cotton linen blend, since that is what they had at the fabric store in a decent selection of colors. The colors remind me of Kermit and Miss. Piggy for some reason, I'm quite pleased with them even if the whole thing leans a bit towards the obnoxious (isn't that the point though?)

What I am trying to decide at the moment is how to close the front. Based on the picture, it sort of looks like the gown is probably laced up either in front or down the sides and there does not seem to be a visible undergown. It's a little hard to tell and I have not been able to find a higher res version of this image to see if there is any more detail. Because the fabric is not so very sturdy I will be wearing a supportive layer underneath, I'm wondering how I ought to close this thing up. I'm leaning towards buttons even though I really can't find any suggestion that this is how this sort of gown would have been closed that way. It would certainly be easier for my purposes. A laced overgown over a laced undergown sounds like a big PITA.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

All together, this blasted thing took 175 hours and 5 minutes to embroider and another 8 hours 45 minutes for finishing (that includes carding wool for the stuffing, sewing the interior pillow, constructing the whole thing and doing the braided edging). I cannot being to express how glad I am that this project is done. At some point today I actually had the rather distressing thought that making another cushion for my chair might be a good plan. God help me.

I'm not sure what the next big project will be. Probably the Mary of Hungary smocking, now that I've got past the planning stage and got this done actually tackling the stitching sounds a lot more appealing. I've got a couple of other smocking projects I want to work on as well as some weaving things that have been set aside while I've been trying to get this done, plus I need to get back on track with my A&S 50 stuff. Lots of possibilities! And yay for getting a big thing done and off my plate!

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Just over 175 hours later and I've finally finished the embroidery for this blasted book cushion! Yay! I'm sort of in shock, truth be told. I've been working on this stupid thing for so long it feels sort of strange to actually be done with it. Well, done in the done with the embroidery part sense of done. I need to actually make it into a cushion but that should be fairly straightforward. I'm not going to do anything overly complicated. I'm planning to back the embroidery with linen, make the back of the cushion from blue silk, and stuff the thing with wool then finish the edge with a nice bit the same embroidered braided edging I've used on the bags. A red edge should bring the whole thing together and brighten it up just a little bit.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

150 hours 35 minutes into this project and the end is in sight. Sort of. I'm more than halfway done with the fill-in and making good progress. My goal it to get this done so I can put it on display at Pennsic, which means I need to be done by the time I leave on the 23rd. I think I can do it, I just need to stay focused and work for a few hours each day. At least I can see my progress as I'm working. It helps to play games with myself and set a goal for the day (fill in one diamond, two diamonds, whatever).

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it's looking. I've found some mistakes that are annoying me towards where I started the piece, but there's not much I can do about that now. You really can't see them unless you look super hard so it's not a big deal. Certainly nothing that detracts from success of the piece. The only issue I really have is that the color values seem somehow off. It was all good until I started in on the green, then the gold got sort of washed out. I'm not really sure if if the green needed to be lighter or a brighter shade, or if I should have gone with a different color or perhaps a lighter blue or tone the whole thing down, but it does look good with the book that it's meant to go with.